The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 82
“It’s easy to be disappointed in people,” she said, “but we do our best. And maybe what a person is and what they do—is not always the same.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But maybe it is.”
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The newspapers were filled with the upcoming trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and her explosive allegations against the city. Each day after work, Rye brought home copies of the Press, the Chronicle, and the Spokesman-Review, sat by Mrs. Ricci’s fire, and followed the latest developments. At the shop, Dominic would see Rye grab the newspaper and ask, “How’s your girl doing today, Ryan?” On Sundays, Rye would tell Dominic and Gemma stories about what Gurley had done on the road, talking them out of trouble in Taft and telling an angry priest that, “um, female parts” should be emancipated.
Her case had become the biggest story in the west after her exposé was published by the Agitator and in a special edition of the Industrial Worker, distributed in western Washington and over the border in Idaho. The story, in turn, was picked up by progressive newspapers, and then by mainstream papers all over the country, which hinted at her “bestial and barbaric accusations.”
Still, within weeks of her arrest, the whole country knew that a pregnant nineteen-year-old labor agitator was accusing Spokane police and jailers of misusing women, extorting madams, pimps, and saloon owners, and then, if they didn’t pay the cops, jailing prostitutes and making them “work off” their fines.
Chief Sullivan insisted that her charges were “scurrilous lies” and that there “has never been a single complaint” filed against the women’s jail. And when the Press unearthed two earlier complaints similar to Gurley’s, Sullivan said those were scurrilous lies, too. When the Chronicle followed up with a story that, for two years, Sullivan had resisted appointing a jail matron, and that he’d rejected women’s groups who had offered volunteers to do the job, the mayor said he had no alternative but to promise a thorough investigation.
Gurley’s corruption story also began to shift the city’s sympathies. Religious groups and temperance reformers picketed the courthouse, demanding action. They showed up, too, at the home where Gurley Flynn was under house arrest, and with the police unsure what to do, she came out and gave an impromptu rally from her front porch. By early February, as her trial was opening, both the Spokane Garden Society and the Spokane Women’s Club had offered to testify on her behalf, saying that they’d found nothing untoward in her message.
When the trial started, reporters, portraitists, and photographers came from as far away as New York and Washington, D.C., to do drawings and hand-colored photos of her striking, youthful face and her hood of black hair—this pretty young martyr fighting alone against an entire corrupt Old West town. They drew her from the shoulders up, tastefully, as she had entered her eighth month of pregnancy.
As the story spread throughout the country, Spokane’s boosters complained in letters to the editor that the city’s reputation was suffering, that Spokane was in danger of becoming known as a backwoods outpost where the police traded in vice and harassed young women who objected. Prominent businessmen suggested replacing Acting Chief Sullivan and launching a full review of police practices.
What was bad for the city was good for the IWW, and it attracted new volunteers and donations, although, because the union had been banned in Spokane, new members were routed to the closest IWW office, thirty-five miles over the border in Coeur d’Alene. Emboldened, Gurley announced that the next Free Speech Day in Spokane would be March 15, no matter the outcome of her trial or her pregnancy. “If I’m in jail, I will exercise my right to speak there, and I will listen at the bars for the cries of freedom coming from the streets outside.”
Hobos even began venturing back to town, the Press running a story about two floaters from the Taft, Montana, labor camp who had walked all the way to Spokane to donate sixty dollars they’d raised for Gurley Flynn’s defense.
All of this made the conspiracy trial of Elizabeth G. F. Jones and Charles L. Filigno the biggest spectacle in the west. By the time she took the stand to testify on her own behalf, in late February, Gurley was startlingly pregnant, her lawyer helping support her as she rose in the courtroom. She made the most of her two days on the stand, delivering lectures to simple yes-no questions like “Where were you born?”
“All of my life, from my early childhood in New York and near Boston, where my father worked, to my more recent travels in the glorious west, I have seen my people, my family and my class, suffer under the inequalities of a system that produces paupers at one extreme and multimillionaires at the other, and nothing in the middle but space. That’s why I am in this work.”
The judge interrupted her speeches and argued with her and on the second day demanded, “What makes you think you can say whatever you want about anyone?”
She gave her shortest answer yet: “The Bill of Rights, sir.”
Someone applauded, and the judge rapped his gavel and asked where had she gotten the law degree that allowed her to do his job, interpreting the legal application of constitutional amendments, and Gurley responded not to him but to the jury and the courtroom: “They are written in plain English, anyone can understand them. They were written not for lawyers but for the people.”
The prosecutor, Pugh, worked hard to remind the jury that the IWW was made up not of young, charming Elizabeth Gurley Flynns but of suspicious foreigners like Charlie Filigno. Soon Pugh was stretching out Filigno’s name to four syllables in every question he asked: “On January eleventh, Mrs. Jones, did you and Mr. Fil-ig-i-no send this telegraph to the Butte office of the WFM?” and “Does this article accurately reflect the radical views of Mr. Fil-ig-i-no